After all, who needs more information about the climate? It’s not like there’s been anything weird going on with the weather lately.

Oh wait. On the same day that the House voted to reduce funding for NOAA, the agency announced that the United States had just recorded its warmest 12-month period of temperatures since records started being kept in 1895.

The Washington Post provided some highlights of the report:

In the last year, the U.S. has experienced its second hottest summer, fourth warmest winter (December through February) and warmest March on record. And NCDC announced April 2012 was third warmest on record…

The degree by which some states and regions have exceeded their norms so far this year is incredible, and record-setting… The U.S. Climate Extremes Index – that tracks extremes in temperatures, precipitation and tropical cyclones – showed a record 42 percent of the country experienced extreme weather during the first four months of the year, primarily exceptional warmth.

The amendment’s author, Andy Harris, is the chairman of a House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. He has previously criticized NOAA’s funding requests for a climate-related initiative on the grounds that “the climate services could become little propaganda sources instead of a science source.”

So, for fear of being exposed to propaganda, we’ll just stick our heads in the sand and wait until our asses fry off. I guess it’s better not to know what’s happening to the planet, if we’re not going to do anything about it anyway.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical — the ever more turbulent, erratic and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure — and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35 percent of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011.  As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it.  There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day.  If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

The day will begin in the Marshall Islands of the far Pacific, where the sun first rises on our planet, and where locals will hold a daybreak underwater demonstration on their coral reef already threatened by rising seas. They’ll hold, in essence, a giant dot — and so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar, Senegal, they’ll mark the tidal margins of recent storm surges.  In Adelaide, Australia, activists will host a “dry creek regatta” to highlight the spreading drought down under.

Pakistani farmers — some of the millions driven from their homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two years — will mark the day on the banks of the Indus; in Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will protest next to a temple destroyed by December’s epic deluges that also left the capital, Bangkok, awash.

Activists in Ulanbataar will focus on the ongoing effects of drought in Mongolia.  In Daegu, South Korea, students will gather with bags of rice and umbrellas to connect the dots between climate change, heavy rains, and the damage caused to South Korea’s rice crop in recent years. In Amman, Jordan, Friends of the Earth Middle East will be forming a climate dot on the shores of the Dead Sea to draw attention to how climate-change-induced drought has been shrinking that sea.

In Herzliya, Israel, people will form a dot on the beach to stand in solidarity with island nations and coastal communities around the world that are feeling the impact of climate change. In newly freed Libya, students will hold a teach-in.  In Oman, elders will explain how the weather along the Persian Gulf has shifted in their lifetimes. There will be actions in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and in the highlands of Peru where drought has wrecked the lives of local farmers.  In Monterrey, Mexico, they’ll recall last year’s floods that did nearly $2 billion in damage. In Chamonix, France, climbers will put a giant red dot on the melting glaciers of the Alps.

And across North America, as the sun moves westward, activists in Halifax, Canada, will “swim for survival” across its bay to highlight rising sea levels, while high-school students in Nashville, Tennessee, will gather on a football field inundated by 2011’s historic killer floods.

In Portland, Oregon, city dwellers will hold an umbrella-decorating party to commemorate March’s record rains. In Bandelier, New Mexico, firefighters in full uniform will remember last year’s record forest fires and unveil the new solar panels on their fire station.  In Miami, Manhattan, and Maui, citizens will line streets that scientists say will eventually be underwater. In the high Sierra, on one of the glaciers steadily melting away, protesters will unveil a giant banner with just two words, a quote from that classic of western children’s literature, ”The Wizard of Oz.” “I’m Melting” it will say, in letters three-stories high.

This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on.  But — as with the tobacco industry before them — the evidence has simply gotten too strong.

Once you saw enough people die of lung cancer, you made the connection. The situation is the same today.  Now, it’s not just the scientists and the insurance industry; it’s your neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird.  Fifteen thousand U.S. temperature records were broken, mainly in the East and Midwest, in the month of March alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved across the continent.  Most people I met enjoyed the rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly wrong and they knew it.

The one institution in our society that isn’t likely to be much help in spreading the news is… the news. Studies show our papers and TV channels paying ever less attention to our shifting climate.  In fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming. Don’t expect representatives from Saturday’s Connect the Dots day to show up on Sunday’s talk shows.  Over the last three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have devoted 98 minutes total to the planet’s biggest challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time on climate change — and here’s a shock: all of it was given over to Republican politicians in the great denial sweepstakes.

So here’s a prediction: Next Sunday, no matter how big and beautiful the demonstrations may be that we’re mounting across the world, “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press” won’t be connecting the dots. They’ll be gassing along about Newt Gingrich’s retirement from the presidential race or Mitt Romney’s coming nomination, and many of the commercials will come from oil companies lying about their environmental efforts. If we’re going to tell this story — and it’s the most important story of our time — we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.

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According to Ian Bremmer, the author of the new book “Every Nation for Itself,” the rise of the “G-Zero” means the world has entered a transformative new phase — which will be more chaotic, uncooperative and dangerous. In his book, he charts how America assumed the burden of global leadership in the wake of World War II, and how institutions like the United Nations, NATO, the G-7 and the IMF helped it dictate the international agenda for much of the past century. He also explains how the breakdown of those (often problematic) institutions is now hurting our ability to marshal global leaders to deal with some of the greatest threats facing our planet. Bremmer, the head of a global political risk research firm who has written for the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs, believes that this new dynamic could lead us to a new, more egalitarian world — or to a new Cold War.

Salon spoke to Bremmer over the phone about America’s new isolationism, the cyber-attack threat and why China will never replace the USA.

You start off the book by talking about the Copenhagen climate summit. What does the outcome of that conference tell us about the changing dynamics in the world?

Frankly, the only success that was had at that summit was that Queen Margaret of Denmark managed to avoid sitting next to Mugabe from Zimbabwe. There had been so much buildup to this summit, that the climate is incredibly important and we’ve all finally gotten to the point where we agree that something needs to be done. It seemed like the classic area that you could get some form of global agreement on. Of course we came away with absolutely nothing.

Following the Copenhagen summit we haven’t pushed harder to get stuff done, we’ve actually just moderated our expectations. Every country is prioritizing its own very strong agenda and there’s an absence of acceptance of what the global road map should look like, what the global architecture should look like. This dynamic is increasingly true in so many aspects of the world, whether we talk about the election of a new president of the World Bank, or on how you fund the IMF (and what you do with the money once it’s there), global trade initiatives, security issues in places like Syria, sanctions on Iran, bailing out the Europeans.  I mean, really the principal dynamic in the world today is the fact that there just isn’t anyone driving the bus.  We don’t have a G-20. We have a G-Zero.

Why is the G-7 an anachronism?

The G-7 is an anachronism in the same way that the United Nations Security Council is an anachronism, in the same way that the old structure of the IMF and the World Bank is an anachronism. All of that stuff basically came out of World War II, when the United States was the dominant power in the world, and it created a world order using its own capital, using its allies, building up its allies, prioritizing its values and its interests. And that world order functioned very well for us for decades but of course over the last 30 years, the underlying balance of power shifted away from this G-1 environment toward China. It hasn’t shifted to China — it’s not as if China is now the new superpower — but toward China, and away from the developed world toward the developing world, and away from debtor states toward creditor states.  When the underlying balance of power no longer in any way reflects the global architecture that you have, then at some point, clearly, a shock will come along that will be big enough to crash that system.

The end of the Soviet Union was not big enough to make that happen, and 9/11 was not big enough to make that happen, but the 2008 financial crisis was big enough. And that effectively made the G-7 an anachronism. And it did so in part, of course, because it showed some of the vulnerabilities of the U.S.-led free market system; it certainly made it harder for the Americans to rally the emerging markets behind their values and preferences. But more important, the Europeans have been almost completely absent from the global stage over the past four years, and frankly so have the Japanese, with their 17 prime ministers in 22 years. And by the way, I strongly feel this is not a book about U.S. decline. I actually don’t believe the U.S. is in decline. It’s much more a book about the fact that the United States is not going to do this stuff anymore and its allies certainly are not coming along, but nobody else is either.

What happened after World War II to propel America to this position?

Well, it wasn’t just that they helped win the war, it was that the economies and infrastructures of the other countries — both victors and vanquished – were utterly destroyed, and the United States rebuilt them. Of course, that was the Marshall Plan. And that also was MacArthur in Japan. So the U.S. basically built up both its allies as well as the vanquished Japanese who surrendered, to create folks that would support a U.S.-led global system. And that worked very effectively indeed.

In polls, more and more Americans want a kind of inward focus and less involvement in the world stage — an issue that’s also played itself out in the Republican primary. Why do you think that is? 

The reason why I make the point that this book is not about whether or not the U.S. is in decline is because it’s very clear that America is the world’s largest economy, and more important, even if it weren’t, even when China becomes the largest, richest economy, China will still be a poor country. If the Americans wanted to remove Assad from power in Syria they surely could. If America wanted to bail the Europeans out they surely could; we have the money. It’s also true that if we wanted to balance our budget, we could, but we don’t. The political will doesn’t exist for that. And so much of that has to do with the political system, and it has to do also with the inward-lookingness of the U.S.

I happen to think that there has been this significant “coming apart” within the United States of the top 10 percent and the bottom 90 percent economically. But that coming apart within the U.S. is also being mirrored by a coming apart globally. And that there aren’t many Americans that are prepared to support the U.S. as the world’s policeman anymore. There aren’t many Americans that are prepared to say they benefit from U.S.-led globalization. With the levels of unemployment that exist in the U.S., with manufacturing jobs that have gone away and aren’t coming back, with Katrina and New Orleans not getting rebuilt, large numbers of Americans are saying, “We do not see the benefit from all of what the U.S. has been doing internationally.” And that will make it politically inconceivable for the U.S. to do the kind of things that it did when it was putting together the old world order. I mean, Geithner can get on a plane and go to Europe and give as much advice as he wants to. But there’s nowhere near the level of political support in the United States for the Americans to pull off another Marshall Plan in Europe, or anything remotely close to that.

And even in the case of Libya, which of course is the big intervention that happened after the 2008 financial crisis, look at what actually happened. The U.S. did not want to do it. Everyone hated Gadhafi — U.S. enemies, U.S. allies. The Brits and the French said, You’ve gotta remove this guy. And only then did the U.S. say they would, and still the U.S. did not have troops on the ground. In some ways, Libya is the exception that proves the rule, that whether we’re talking about trade or climate or security or the European crisis, all of these are issues where we’re just not going to see the kind of leadership anywhere that we have historically.

I think many people would see this as a positive decline in so-called American imperialism.

Well, first of all there’s no question that American intervention on the military side has been seen as problematic. But for every country that sees it as problematic, others have seen it as something essential. You can talk about Marshall Plan, the role that the U.S. has played in the World Bank and the IMF, the importance of the Peace Corps and all of this sort of stuff – these have been organizations that generally have been very welcomed in terms of the benefit for the common good.

A few years ago, I remember reading endless magazine articles about how China was going to become the new superpower, and we’ll all be learning Mandarin in grade school. You don’t think that’s going to be the case. 

I put that into strong question and there are a number of reasons for it. The first is that for the Chinese to continue to succeed they need to fundamentally restructure both their economy and their political system. They’re aware of this. It’s an enormous challenge, it’s never been attempted with a country remotely the size of China, and they’ll need to do it relatively quickly.  First of all, there are no guarantees that they will succeed and, even assuming that they succeed, or they even succeed sufficiently to stave off various crises, when China becomes the world’s largest economy, it will still be a poor country. And I don’t think we sufficiently appreciate how different that will be. They will be focused much more on ensuring that they can provide the minimum form of employment and growth and commodity inputs for their own people. The United States is a rich country. The U.S. can easily afford to spend a lot of time helping to provide public goods, acting as a global policeman across the world, and it’s done that for over a century, again for good and for bad. The Chinese will not be prepared to play that role.

Look at what China’s doing in the Middle East: They are interested in defending very narrow interests – economic and security interests. It’s easy for the United States to say, we want to do more on the global environment, because the average American is paying attention.  The average Chinese person has a very different view of the global environment. They want a car. They want their kids to be able to have an apartment. They want a proper education. Hundreds of millions of them want to get out of absolute poverty.

The last few decades have been sort of notable, because there’s been relatively little death and conflict around the globe, compared to other periods of time in global history — a point made by the recent book, “The War on War.” What do you think the G-Zero environment means for the security of the world?

Clearly we’re going to see much more conflict in this environment. And the question is what kind of conflict it will be. I tend to not see this as a world where we’re going to have military and the sort of conventional warfare between major powers. Compared to the pre-WWII environment, there’s so much more interlinkage between the economies of countries. But having said that, we’re definitely seeing a fragmentation of the world order, compared to a globalization and statelessness that had been driven by the United States at the order of the global markets over the past decade. What does that mean? Well, first of all it means we’ll see much more cyber-conflict. Much more industrial espionage. Much more direct and overt conflict between states and corporations. More protectionism.  More industrial policy. Those sorts of things, I think we will see more conflict overall. I think that can spill over into military conflict regionally that won’t necessarily involve the United States.

In a G-Zero environment the Middle East is much more problematic. Because absent strong US, European, Japanese, Chinese or Russian intervention, what you end up having is the Saudis, the Iranians, and the Turks playing much greater roles in terms of diplomacy and political influence, economic influence, military influence.  Those countries support completely different outcomes. Clearly that means more sectarian conflict.  We’re not going to see more integration in the Middle East, we’re going to see more disintegration, more fragmentation, more confrontation.

In the book you also suggest that we’ll be see the rise of privatized warfare, using contractors like the company formerly known as Blackwater. I find that a worrisome prediction.

You know, absent U.S. intervention, you are likely to see many more local arms races, like India vs. China, for example. But you’ll also see the privatization of warfare, where countries with cash will be buying mercenaries that are well-trained, whatever they can afford, and they’ll be doing the fighting for them. And that will also be true in terms of folks that can engage in cyber-warfare and folks that can protect you from cyber-warfare. In a G-Zero environment, fighting of all sorts gets fragmented.

How does this affect our ability to deal with global warming?

Well, this is one of the problems I have today with the political debate. You’ve got so many people out there who are saying, “Global warming is horrible and we have to do something.” But it’s fairly obvious that we’re not going to. And again, it’s not as if the world has never been capable of dealing with climate problems.  You remember, we had a hole in the ozone, and I believe it was in 1976 that there was this Montreal protocol that was going to stop putting the CFCs in the atmosphere.  And it was effective.

It’s very clear that this climate issue, as you mentioned, is a much, much bigger order of baggage. It’s going to cause a lot of death, a lot of displacement. There will be winners as well. There will be folks who are successful economically out of climate change, but overall, it’s a negative for the world economy, and it is inconceivable in a G-Zero environment that you’re going to move efficiently even toward the beginning of a global solution, and so what will happen is you will have local solutions.  Local solutions will not be coordinated, they will be less efficient, and they will focus on those issues that are most important to individual governments directly. In the case of the Maldives, they’ll buy land and they’ll move. In the case of China, they’ll focus on issues that are impacting their domestic population, without worrying about what they’re doing to the global public commons in terms of emitting pollutants into the air. As they need to industrialize but they’ll focus much more on water, for example, because they desperately need that water for themselves.

And the U.S. and others will start focusing on geo-engineering — looking at what can be done to potentially artificially lower temperatures and create cloud cover and, you know, all of these sort of things which 10 years ago were fanciful but now increasingly people are starting to look into seriously.  But the issue is that those solutions will not be taken globally.  And what will be seen as a solution by one country or a set of like-minded countries might actually be seen as very strongly against the interest of other countries and other actors.

What countries do you think are going to be helped by this new G-Zero arrangement?

There are a group of countries that I think will do particularly well in this environment and I call them pivot states. The reason I focus on these pivot states is in a G-Zero environment you need to not just focus on growth — because there’s so much more volatility in the world, you need to focus on growth and resilience together. It’s countries that are able to hedge and adapt between different models of growth and integration, that don’t get captured by any individual large country [that will thrive] and certain countries are particularly good at doing that.

Canada’s really good at doing that. If Obama doesn’t want to do the Keystone pipeline, there are a lot of Chinese that want to have access to Canadian energy. As climate change occurs, the Canadians will have this northern shipping route, which will help them to have access to folks all over the world and will help them have access to Arctic resources. They sell more timber in British Columbia to China now than they do the United States, and that’s very interesting. Singapore pivots very well. Kazakhstan increasingly pivots well where Mongolia, nearby, actually doesn’t because they’re much more in the pocket of the Chinese. I would argue that Indonesia pivots relatively well, Turkey pivots quite well. Mexico doesn’t. Ukraine doesn’t.

You claim there are a few possible outcome scenarios from the G-Zero world. What are they? 

The G-Zero is not the next world order. It is a global power vacuum that is not sustainable. Something will fill it, because crises will continue to grow and not be resolved and so that very process will lead to something new.  And the question is what that something new is. And I think to understand what’s coming next there are two questions you need to answer. The first is, what will be the relationship of the United States and China toward each other: Will they be relatively cooperative or relatively competitive? And the second is how much do other countries matter; do they matter a little or a lot? If you can answer those two questions you have a really good sense of where the world is going.

The only one of my scenarios that gets you to a G-20 that actually works is one where the U.S. and China have relatively harmonious relations and other countries matter a lot. So far we are not moving in that direction. So far we’ve been moving into an environment where the U.S. and China have more confrontational relations and we’re moving toward an environment where other countries are indeed likely to play a fairly significant role. So you’ll end up with a world of regions.  That’s a much more inefficient environment and it’s one where pivoting is absolutely critical.

The other two possibilities are one where the U.S. and China have good relations and other countries don’t matter: That’s the G-2 path. That’s an environment where pivoting doesn’t matter so much but where nothing gets resolved unless it happens to be a priority on the agendas of both the United States and China.  The U.S. does relatively well in that environment, actually, and so does the dollar. The other environment is the one where no one can pivot and that’s if the U.S. and China have bad relations and other countries don’t matter very much, and that is really a bipolar cold war. It’s by far the worst of all outcomes, though it’s not actually the one I expect.

But this is very much in process. Countries are in play right now, geopolitics are in play. We are in a process of creative destruction, globally, that hasn’t occurred since after WWII.

A British-educated democratic activist who had been tortured in prison during the 30-year dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Nasheed was the surprise winner of a 2008 election that followed a popular uprising against the regime. In addition to pursuing an ambitious agenda of liberalization and modernization within his entirely Islamic nation, Nasheed seized upon climate change as an international clarion call. And no wonder — the Maldives is an Indian Ocean archipelago of several hundred inhabited islands (and fewer than 350,000 people), with a median altitude of 1.5 meters above sea level. As Nasheed says in Jon Shenk’s extraordinarily compelling documentary film, “The Island President,” it is a nation without a single hill. Nasheed has traveled the world describing the Maldives as the Poland of global warming — meaning, of course, Poland in 1939. If his country cannot be saved from rising sea levels, he maintains, then there may be no saving Tokyo or Mumbai or New Orleans or New York.

Shenk got extraordinary access to the inner workings of Nasheed’s administration, attending cabinet meetings in Malé, the Maldivian capital, and traveling with Nasheed to address the British Parliament and the United Nations. We watch Nasheed and his advisors hatching the plan to make the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral nation — not because it will make any practical difference, but because it will stand as a moral example that might shame the big emitters into doing something. (“At least we will die knowing we did the right thing,” he says.) Most fascinating of all, we observe the backroom deal that Nasheed helped broker in Copenhagen, where he served as a critical emissary between his Western allies (notably the British and Australian prime ministers) and the Chinese and Indian delegations, which viewed any climate deal as an unfair limitation on their right to self-development.

“The Island President” had been playing at film festivals for more than a year, to widespread acclaim, when an unexpected political twist lent it a new urgency. In early February, Nasheed was forced to resign the presidency in what he says was a coup d’état staged by Gayoom and his supporters, including radical Islamists who opposed his reforms. As Nasheed wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed a day after his resignation, “Let the Maldives be a lesson for aspiring democrats everywhere: the dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship.”

I recently met with Nasheed and filmmaker Jon Shenk, at a private club in downtown Manhattan to discuss “The Island President,” climate change policy and the situation in the Maldives. If the public genuinely supported him, I asked the former president, couldn’t he have resisted the coup. “Yes, I could have remained in power,” he said. “We could have murdered the coup. I could have asked people to go out and start shooting at the police, and finish it. But that would be a very shortsighted way of looking at things.” One can perhaps accuse Nasheed of being too idealistic, or overly optimistic — I’m afraid he undervalues the power of know-nothingism, arrogance and stupidity in American politics, for example. But you can’t say he isn’t taking the long view. (He says that if and when new elections are held in the Maldives, he will definitely run again.)

Mr. President, early in the film there’s a scene where you observe that after you had taken power in 2008 you thought the fight was over, and then you realized it was only beginning. That’s even more prophetic now than it was then.

Mohamed Nasheed: Yes, it is. You know, the dictatorship is back again. We were complacent to think that it would be easy to get rid of a dictatorship. Of course it was not easy to win that election and bring Gayoom down in the first place. But now he is back again, and the fight has to continue. It is very important that democracy be restored in the Maldives, and we hope that friendly governments understand the necessity and the need for it. As we see it now, I’m afraid the government there is going to all sorts of places. Certainly it’s not going democratically, and we need to bring it back.

For people who might not have followed the confusing news reports out of your country, please update us on what’s been going on.

There was a coup, and they overthrew the elected government. The previous dictator, Gayoom, is back, and all his children are back in ministerial posts. All his associates are back in government. Also, what is worse — not only Gayoom is back, but this coup was instigated through Islamic radicalism as well. There is a section of that in the Maldives, and I’m afraid we now have three Islamic radicals in the cabinet. We beat them in three elections, and they were not able to get any position in government. Now, through the coup, they are back, and Gayoom is back. So there is no respect for what the people have said.

And how has the general public reacted to this?

Everyone is out on the streets. There are huge demonstrations going on. People don’t seem to be getting tired. They’re not relenting, and they want to go on and on and on. We hope for a peaceful solution, of course, to what is happening now. We wouldn’t want the country to deteriorate into violence. If we can act quickly, if we can do it now, we will be avoiding a whole bunch of difficulties in the future.

President Obama spent part of his childhood in the Indian Ocean region and has a long-standing personal and political interest in that part of the world. Has he or his administration reached out to you since the coup?

I’m afraid that the United States government was very quick to recognize the status quo. This is very, very sad. I was shocked to see that. I hoped that they would understand, and realign their policies. Now I’m trying to speak to the people of the United States, because of that. We respect the United States and its people so much. We’ve been trying to liberalize the country. We’ve been trying to make it into a more moderate country, and it is sad that our policies were not seen and not backed by the United States. They’re still talking about how they need time; they’re still talking to Gayoom. There’s a game we used to play when we were little: Finders Keepers. It doesn’t matter how you find it, you know! But that’s not how one would support a democracy. I would hope that President Obama would understand what is happening in the Maldives, and I would hope he would lay his weight on the bureaucrats and bring a better political solution to what is happening in our country.

I assume that the new government, the one headed by your former vice president, is not going to address the climate-change issue in the same way you did.

They can’t. You must have a high moral authority to address climate change. Every time you start speaking, you know, you can’t be answering back to the skeletons in your own closet. So it’s not going to be possible for them to articulate in the same manner as a democratic government. I don’t see it happening.

At numerous points in the film, you express personal misgivings about dealing with the compromises and the rhetoric of politics. It makes the film very dramatic, because you seem like such a plainspoken and pragmatic person in a realm of spin and empty words. How frustrating was it, actually being a head of state?

Well, you know, soon you realize this is how governments work. We were elected to show our differences, not to go along with the status quo or to go along with tradition. We were elected to change things, so we did change things. We brought in legislation for a proper tax system. We brought in legislation for social protection programs, including medical care for all. We wanted to liberalize the country, in tune with its older Islamic traditions. We wanted to bring out the women, to empower them. These were all things that we were facing, major challenges. We wanted to reform the judiciary, the military, the police. We could not address all these things, and yes, at times it was frustrating. But we were, I think, delivering on our pledges and that was why Gayoom came back. He knew he could do nothing in elections, so he had to topple me.

Jon, let’s bring you into the conversation. As an outsider who clearly spent a lot of time in the Maldives, did you see the writing on the wall, as far as what happened to Nasheed’s presidency?

Jon Shenk: Anybody visiting the capital or talking to people in government could see from the get-go that the shadow of 30 years of dictatorship loomed heavily over the country. You’re talking about 30 years of autocratic rule, where contracts were given to favored relatives and friends, monopolies were allowed and all that. We would go to cafés in the capital and sit with our Maldivian counterparts to talk about the logistics of filmmaking, and their answers would be given to us in whispers. We’d ask, “Why are you whispering?” and they would say, “Well, you never know who’s in the room. Gayoom’s people could be in the room.” That’s the kind of fear they had. I’d say, “But they’re not in power anymore,” and the answer was, “Oh, but they are. They’re still in the police, they run the opposition parties, they’re trying to undermine us at every stage. And if they do get the presidency back, we’ll be put in prison.”

So that kind of fear really did exist. When the coup happened, it was shocking, and I was worried about Nasheed and others who I’d been working with. But it wasn’t surprising. They really were trying to do an impossible thing in the Maldives, by creating this vision of a modern, liberal, democratic state on the shoulders of years and years of despotism. And by the way, think about what’s going on in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya today. That’s what they’re trying to do, and in some ways what we’re seeing here — two steps forward, one step back — could be a harbinger of what is to come in those countries.

Mr. President, you’ve mentioned the role that Islamic radicals now play in the government. Can you talk about the role that Islam has played historically in the Maldives?

M.N.: Whatever happens in the Middle East also happens in the Maldives, and whatever happens in the Maldives also happens in the Middle East. During the ’70s, Wahhabism and radical Islam, as soon as it started elsewhere, filtered into the Maldives. And then we saw Gayoom coming. He was educated at al-Azhar University [in Egypt], where he was a classmate of Hosni Mubarak. Gayoom came in the late ’70s, and that also fueled the Islamic rhetoric. When he discovered he could no longer control the radicals, he started arresting them and beating them up. That created an underground network of Islamic radicals, and for a long time they were the only organized group in town. The only organized dissent came from them, because [the democratic opposition] were all in jail.

So young people started joining the radical Islamic groups, and by the time we were able to articulate a movement, they were already entrenched. But we were able to beat them in elections, over and over again. We beat them in the presidential election and we beat them in the parliamentary elections. Out of 1,081 local council seats, they won 4, and only because we did not want to contest them there. I felt that they had to be in the game somewhere. My assumption and my feeling is, you know, if we were able to do the things we were working on, without the coup, we would have been able to liberalize the country and address Islamic radicalism through democratic means, without infringing on their human rights and so on. But unfortunately we were not allowed to do that.

So what is the ideology driving Gayoom and his supporters? Or is there any?

No, there’s no ideology behind it. I mean, the ideology is xenophobia and racism. All the rhetoric against Israel and the West, calling everyone a heathen. It’s really narrow-minded and intolerant and nationalistic. This is an island mentality as well, but it’s possible to change that. It’s not the people who have that mentality but the ruling elite, who want to suppress the people through that narrative, that rhetoric.

Jon, this movie has now gotten a lot of publicity that perhaps you did not expect. Is there a danger that the issue you set out to highlight — the importance of climate change, and of President Nasheed’s engagement with the issue — is now being overshadowed by the political context?

J.S.: When you asked earlier whether the new government would carry on the climate battle, the thing is that Waheed, the new president and former vice president, might pay lip service to that. But it totally ignores the important thing that has happened in the Maldives, where Nasheed and his people have been working for 20 years, in a grass-roots, Gandhian struggle for civil rights and good governance and freedom of speech, all that stuff that has happened in so many of the great democracies of the world. The fight against climate change is an extension of that, in President Nasheed’s mind. It’s a fight for human rights. It’s a fight for the right to exist in a healthy environment and to have the freedom that goes along with that. So they’re one and the same. The fact that the film might get a little more publicity because of this political struggle really is one and the same with the struggle on climate change. It sounds naïve, maybe, but you’re struggling for truth and justice. The climate debate is about that, and so is the fight for democracy. Thematically they are the same, and that’s why Nasheed took on the climate fight when he stepped into office. It was an extension of his life’s work.

M.N.: During the ’70s, democracy movements had human rights as a foundation to build on. I feel that now climate issues and human rights are equally important. You have to save the planet as much as save the people, and democracy can be built on that foundation. I would hope that Egyptians, or all the other democracy movements in the Middle East, would find climate change as a track that they have to address. They cannot come into government without understanding climate issues, and what is happening to the environment around them. If you get beaten up as a human being, that’s very bad. When the world gets battered, no one is physically crying, but the planet is. All democracy leaders, all people who want to fight for freedom and justice, must fight for climate as well. In that sense, Jon’s film is timely and necessary. It’s must viewing for anybody with any interest in democracy.

How long do we have to save the Maldives? If nothing is done, when will your country become uninhabitable?

I think the science here is very, very sorted out. We can’t be so silly as to question the science. We have a window of about seven years to start acting now, and if we can’t do that, then I think within the next 70 years or so we will have very serious issues, not just in the Maldives but everywhere. Issues about resources, about water, about migration. Climate migration — there will be a huge exodus of people from place to place. The Pentagon has come out and said that this is a huge national security threat. But elections are fought almost entirely on economic issues. Nobody talks about human rights.

Presumably we’re not going to hear either President Obama or Gov. Romney talking about this issue for the rest of the year. They may talk about gasoline prices, but not about the underlying issues.

No, but the thing is, we do everything that we do for our children. Why are you working? Why am I working? We would not have any policies for ourselves, but we should have policies for our children. I think democratic leaders have been so shortsighted in listening to their advisors: “Oh, no, no, there are huge oil companies who can do this and that. You can’t do this, Mr. President!” You can do it, and you have to do it. You might lose power, but you are saving your children. We can’t have our policies only go as far as their noses, and the next election.

I am sure a new age of politicians is coming, in the United States as well. I still believe that if President Obama would start articulating on climate issues, he would get more votes, not fewer. I am convinced of it. The people of this country — yes, you are worried about gasoline prices, that’s true. But you are also worried about what’s happening to the rest of the world, to your own planet. You can’t just assume people are so simple, and be so condescending toward them. If you listen to advisors, the only thing people care about, apparently, is what’s in their pocket. If that were true, I wouldn’t be in government. Our children understand all this better than we do. They are not going to vote for oil companies and the status quo. If political leaders think that they have a future by taking the safe side, I think they’re very wrong.

“The Island President” is now playing in New York and San Francisco. It opens April 6 in Los Angeles; April 18 in Waterville, Maine; April 20 in San Diego and Washington; and April 27 in Detroit and Minneapolis, with more cities to follow.

Those facts are these: Humans, since the Industrial Revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and their smokestacks.

Such is what is known to science–what is true (no matter what Rick Santorum might say). But the Pew data showed that humans aren’t as predictable as carbon dioxide molecules. Despite a growing scientific consensus about global warming, as of 2008 Democrats and Republicans had cleaved over the facts stated above, like a divorcing couple. One side bought into them, one side didn’t—and if anything, knowledge and intelligence seemed to be worsening matters.

Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one’s political party affiliation, one’s acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one’s level of education. And here’s the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

For Democrats and Independents, the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science—among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. It’s a reality that generates endless frustration for many scientists—and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable people.

And most of all, for many liberals.

Let’s face it: We liberals and progressives are absolutely outraged by partisan misinformation. Lies about “death panels.” People seriously thinking that President Obama is a Muslim, not born in the United States. Climate-change denial. Debt ceiling denial. These things drive us crazy, in large part because we can’t comprehend how such intellectual abominations could possibly exist.

And not only are we enraged by lies and misinformation; we want to refute them—to argue, argue, argue about why we’re right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed, we often act as though right-wing misinformation’s defeat is nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.

No less than President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren (a man whom I greatly admire, but disagree with in this instance) has stated, when asked how to get Republicans in Congress to accept our mainstream scientific understanding of climate change, that it’s an “education problem.”

But the facts, the scientific data, say otherwise.

Indeed, the rapidly growing social scientific literature on the resistance to global warming (see for examples here and here) says so pretty unequivocally. Again and again, Republicans or conservatives who say they know more about the topic, or are more educated, are shown to be more in denial, and often more sure of themselves as well—and are confident they don’t need any more information on the issue.

Tea Party members appear to be the worst of all. In a recent survey by Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, they rejected the science of global warming even more strongly than average Republicans did. For instance, considerably more Tea Party members than Republicans incorrectly thought there was a lot of scientific disagreement about global warming (69 percent to 56 percent). Most strikingly, the Tea Party members were very sure of themselves—they considered themselves “very well-informed” about global warming and were more likely than other groups to say they “do not need any more information” to make up their minds on the issue.

But it’s not just global warming where the “smart idiot” effect occurs. It also emerges on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased more among better-educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less-educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.

The same effect has also been captured in relation to the myth that the healthcare reform bill empowered government “death panels.” According to research by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Republicans who thought they knew more about the Obama healthcare plan were “paradoxically more likely to endorse the misperception than those who did not.” Well-informed Democrats were the opposite—quite certain there were no “death panels” in the bill.

The Democrats also happened to be right, by the way.

The idealistic, liberal, Enlightenment notion that knowledge will save us, or unite us, was even put to a scientific test last year—and it failed badly.

Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues set out to study the relationship between political views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions on contested scientific issues like global warming. In their study, more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about their political worldviews and their opinions about how dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that’s not all: They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g, “Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria—true or false?”) as well as their numeracy or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., “If Person A’s chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B’s risk is double that of A, what is B’s risk?”).

The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.

Instead, here was the result. If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science—e.g., a political conservative or “hierarchical-individualist”—then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group—“egalitarian-communitarians” or liberals—who tended to worry more as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change—which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.

So much for education serving as an antidote to politically biased reasoning.

What accounts for the “smart idiot” effect?

For one thing, well-informed or well-educated conservatives probably consume more conservative news and opinion, such as by watching Fox News. Thus, they are more likely to know what they’re supposed to think about the issues—what people like them think—and to be familiar with the arguments or reasons for holding these views. If challenged, they can then recall and reiterate these arguments. They’ve made them a part of their identities, a part of their brains, and in doing so, they’ve drawn a strong emotional connection between certain “facts” or claims, and their deeply held political values. And they’re ready to argue.

What this suggests, critically, is that sophisticated conservatives may be very different from unsophisticated or less-informed ones. Paradoxically, we would expect less informed conservatives to be easier to persuade, and more responsive to new and challenging information.

In fact, there is even research suggesting that the most rigid and inflexible breed of conservatives—so-called authoritarians—do not really become their ideological selves until they actually learn something about politics first. A kind of “authoritarian activation” needs to occur, and it happens through the development of political “expertise.” Consuming a lot of political information seems to help authoritarians feel who they are—whereupon they become more accepting of inequality, more dogmatically traditionalist, and more resistant to change.

So now the big question: Are liberals also “smart idiots”?

There’s no doubt that more knowledge—or more political engagement—can produce more bias on either side of the aisle. That’s because it forges a stronger bond between our emotions and identities on the one hand, and a particular body of facts on the other.

But there are also reason to think that, with liberals, there is something else going on. Liberals, to quote George Lakoff, subscribe to a view that might be dubbed “Old Enlightenment reason.” They really do seem to like facts; it seems to be part of who they are. And fascinatingly, in Kahan’s study liberals did not act like smart idiots when the question posed was about the safety of nuclear power.

Nuclear power is a classic test case for liberal biases—kind of the flip side of the global warming issue–for the following reason. It’s well known that liberals tend to start out distrustful of nuclear energy: There’s a long history of this on the left. But this impulse puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on the matter (scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal).

So are liberals “smart idiots” on nukes? Not in Kahan’s study. As members of the “egalitarian communitarian” group in the study—people with more liberal values–knew more science and math, they did not become more worried, overall, about the risks of nuclear power. Rather, they moved in the opposite direction from where these initial impulses would have taken them. They become less worried—and, I might add, closer to the opinion of the scientific community on the matter.

You may or may not support nuclear power personally, but let’s face it: This is not the “smart idiot” effect. It looks a lot more like open-mindedness.

What does all of this mean?

First, these findings are just one small slice of an emerging body of science on liberal and conservative psychological differences, which I discuss in detail in my forthcoming book. An overall result is definitely that liberals tend to be more flexible and open to new ideas—so that’s a possible factor lying behind these data. In fact, recent evidence suggests that wanting to explore the world and try new things, as opposed to viewing the world as threatening, may subtly push people toward liberal ideologies (and vice versa).

Politically and strategically, meanwhile, the evidence presented here leaves liberals and progressives in a rather awkward situation. We like evidence—but evidence also suggests that politics doesn’t work in the way we want it to work, or think it should. We may be the children of the Enlightenment—convinced that you need good facts to make good policies—but that doesn’t mean this is equally true for all of humanity, or that it is as true of our political opponents as it is of us.

Nevertheless, this knowledge ought to be welcomed, for it offers a learning opportunity and, frankly, a better way of understanding politics and our opponents alike. For instance, it can help us see through the scientific-sounding arguments of someone like Rick Santorum, who has been talking a lot about climate science lately—if only in order to bash it.

On global warming, Santorum definitely has an argument, and he has “facts” to cite. And he is obviously intelligent and capable—but not, apparently, able to see past his ideological biases. Santorum’s argument ultimately comes down to a dismissal of climate science and climate scientists, and even the embrace of a conspiracy theory, one in which the scientists of the world are conspiring to subvert economic growth (yeah, right).

Viewing all this as an ideologically defensive maneuver not only explains a lot, it helps us realize that refuting Santorum probably serves little purpose. He’d just come up with another argument and response, probably even cleverer than the last, and certainly just as appealing to his audience. We’d be much better concentrating our energies elsewhere, where people are more persuadable.

A more scientific understanding of persuasion, then, should not be seen as threatening. It’s actually an opportunity to do better—to be more effective and politically successful.

Indeed, if we believe in evidence then we should also welcome the evidence showing its limited power to persuade–especially in politicized areas where deep emotions are involved. Before you start off your next argument with a fact, then, first think about what the facts say about that strategy. If you’re a liberal who is emotionally wedded to the idea that rationality wins the day—well, then, it’s high time to listen to reason.